Reading 1

Boswell Books held a reading for Paul Salsini’s latest book, The Temptation of Father Lorenzo, on November 19, 2012. The small audience mainly consisted of an older generation of Salsini admirers and a few students. Salsini’s lineage stems from a village in Florence, Italy and it was while visiting a relative in a Tuscan village that interesting stories from World War II were shared with him. It was these stories of amazing story of bravery of these villagers that Salsini wanted explore in all of his Tuscan themed books. The Temptation of Father Lorenzo is an extension of those revelations. The book became a series of short stories that revolve around previously established characters from the Salsini’s previous Tuscan Trilogy. Interestingly, Salsini wrote this book as a response to the past trilogies character’s that called to him. He even joked that “I couldn’t get them out of my head.” He often wondered what they were up to as if the actually existed in the present day. In the end, it was interesting to hear Salsini expound on the past lives of the Italian villagers during this period.

For the first few minuets of Salsini’s introduction I was distracted. What took my focus was his uncanny resemblance to the actor John Houseman. Once I got over that detail I was able to focus on his opening announcements. Salsini’s voice was an uninteresting monotone that was hard to connect to. Nevertheless, I observed that he certainly takes great care of the relationships that he has with his characters. Other than that positive aspect of his working method, his reading didn’t intrigue me. I felt that his stories belonged to an older generation. Superficially, I didn’t connect to his work because he didn’t fascinate me with his style and his characters seemed bland. Now, one aspect to his live performance that I quickly recognized was that there seems to be a technique to reading that keeps people engaged. He doesn’t have that technique. Certainly the man is gifted as a writer but not so much as a speaker. He’s not very entertaining and maybe that’s not the point to a reading. But then again, maybe it is? Needless to say, I won’t be reading any of his work any time soon.